SciShow Tangents - Nutrition

Episode Date: November 26, 2019

When it comes to proper nutrition, just about the only thing everyone can agree on is that people need to eat food. Everything else, from eggs to carbs to vitamins, is basically up in the air!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! If you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these link:[Fact Off]Osedax wormshttps://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1462-2920.2005.00824.xhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967063707001483https://science.sciencemag.org/content/305/5684/668/tab-pdf“Vitamin” B17 aka. Laetrilehttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.3322/canjclin.31.2.91?sid=nlm%3Apubmedhttps://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/cam/hp/laetrile-pdq#_10https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK65988/https://www.amboss.com/us/knowledge/Vitamins[Ask the Science Couch]History of nutrition sciencehttps://www.bmj.com/content/361/bmj.k2392Nutrition research is complicatedhttps://www.vox.com/2016/1/14/10760622/nutrition-science-complicatedhttps://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/explore-healing-practices/food-medicine/why-does-nutrition-advice-change[Butt One More Thing]Sewage sludge protein https://www.feednavigator.com/Article/2017/04/06/Sewage-sludge-to-animal-feed

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's a lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, I'm joined, as always, by Stefan Chin. I'm here again. What's your tagline? How can a cottage make cheese? Sam Schultz is also here. Hey.

Nice shirt. That's the same one I always wear. Yeah. What's your tagline? Beam me up, snotty. Ew. Sari Riley's also in the town. Yep.

What's your tagline? Hire me as your game show host. And I'm Hank Green, and my tagline is for ducks. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we try to get together and one-up and amaze and delight each other with science facts. And we're playing for glory. We're also playing for Sam Bucks. They're called Sam Bucks because Sam won season one. We're going to do everything we can to stay on topic, but we won't, probably.

So if you go on a tangent that we deem unworthy, you can get Dr. Hank Buck. Oh, excuse me. Oh, I'm sorry. The best way to do that is to talk about Twilight. And now, as always, we introduce this week's science topic with the traditional science poem. It's from Sam. When I was a lad, I could eat what I wanted, chug four or five sodas, and remain undaunted. Taquitos and chicken wings were a light snack.

Then maybe some Oreos. How about half a pack? The Wendy's value menu was sweet salvation when I was experiencing teenage starvation. But now I am old, and any time I eat garbage, I feel sorry for myself and get quite lethargic. Yeah. That's great. No. Is that your Wendy's Value menu of choice? a healthy diet I now nurture, though sometimes I sneak out for a junior bacon cheeseburger. Is that your Wendy's Value menu of choice? It's actually spicy chicken sandwich, but

junior bacon cheeseburger was a little bit easier. Also, seltzer water is perfectly as fine as Coke. I just need it to be fizzy. That's my thing. Yeah, it helps, but then when you have a Coke after a long time, you're like, why isn't there caffeinated seltzer water, and can that be our thing?

Yeah, we're cutting out of the episode because that's a good idea. The topic is nutrition. So this could be a lot of different things. But basically, nutrition is just... Is it always heterotrophic? Do plants get nutrition from the sun, or do they make it themselves? If I'm a plant, do I have to worry about nutrition? Yeah.

Because I make it myself. There's the plants where like other things poop on them and then they like absorb stuff from that. Yeah. And you could end up planted in a bad place, right? Would that be part of worrying about nutrition? I feel like nutrition, like you must eat. Is breathing nutrition? No.

Oh.'s water nutrition sarah you tell us what nutrition is i think hank has led us down a very winding road to the idea that nutrition is the intake of things that you need to survive okay but not air is then air you do need to metabolize right yeah so i guess air is nutrition what are people supposed to be eating you're supposed to eat food yeah but if we couldn't make twinkies and stuff like that that's the big question that like what it turns out that we're really good at eating lots of different things like we just are fantastic omnivores and our bodies our lifestyles are able to accommodate a tremendous variety like if you talk about like sort of the paleo diet it's really interesting to look at what actually

paleolithic people ate it's just like it's a tremendous variety some people were entirely vegetarian some people ate only blood and milk and meat some people ate ate a mix of all of those things and people were all okay doing all of those things. The big questions now are in our quest to create really inexpensive, really good tasting food, have we just made it too easy to eat too much and too

enjoyable? If food tasted less good, it would be a whole lot easier to eat healthy. Doritos. But food tastes so good now. Like a quarter pound double stack with cheese? Are you kidding me? Oh boy. Do you want to know? I research etymology now. Oh, okay. It comes from nuts.

Nutrition comes from nut, the original food. But it actually comes from the Latin word nutrire, which means, by one definition, feed or nourish. By another definition, to suckle. Ooh, really? So, okay.

Yeah, so plants don't have nutrition. They don't suckle. They suckle out the ground. Yeah, I think their roots suckle. The teat of the earth. That's all they do. I don't think that we made anything any clearer, but we are going to move on. Okay.

But we had some fun. That's what matters. We're going to move on to... Oh, boy. Where one of our panelists has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but most of those facts are fake, but one of them is real. And we have to figure out which one is the real fact. So which of these three things is true?

One. Good intro. No preamble. Number one. A man decided to try to survive on eating grass alone. Oh. He made it for two weeks, but he was consuming so much grass that he had to poop dozens of times a day and so often ended up eating while pooping. That's more than the ideal amount of times to poop a day.

Number two. In the 70s, a mix-up at a chemical company resulted in animal feed being mixed with a flame retardant. Oh, no. The mixture was distributed and fed to livestock and the contaminated animal products were eaten by consumers, resulting in one of the worst mass poisonings in U.S. history. Oh, my gosh. Or number three. But no in U.S. history. Oh my gosh.

Or number three. But no one caught on fire. No one caught on fire. No surgical fires. And number three, researchers studying social ants discovered that whether a female becomes a worker or a queen

is determined by how much food each larva is fed. And it turns out that insulin levels in each larva is the primary driver of what cast the ants end up in, with higher levels of insulin resulting in queens. That's an interesting fact, but it's not like a guy ate grass for two weeks and during those two weeks he pooped literally thousands of times.

I don't know if the math checks out there. He at least pooped every waking hour. Probably some sleeping hours too. So we've got man ate grass, pooped a lot. Number two, we fed some flame retardant to some animals and then we ate them and we also got sick. Or number three, there are some ants and they turn into different kinds of ants based on what food they get fed and their insulin levels. Is it possible that a flame retardant chemical would not be

toxic to animals in a lethal dose but it would to humans? Well, it doesn't necessarily have to be lethal. They just have to be healthy enough to survive. Yeah, I mean with animals it's like, oh, they're a little sick and let's just slaughter them and feed them to people. And then the people are like, I also now have diarrhea.

And that's still poisoning. You don't have to kill people. I think they would look into what was given all their cows' diarrhea first, maybe. I feel like you could definitely accidentally add the wrong thing to animal food. There's a bunch of additives that go into animal feed. And then the ant one. I don't know anything about ants. I know nothing about ants so i know nothing about ants

that sounds like i know that with bees if you feed certain like the royal jelly something about like a different kind of food makes the bees different yeah no that is true about bees and ants are in the same order maybe as bees and wasps i don't know what sounds right level it is but they're similar they're cousins. They're cousins. And so it makes sense that ants would also, because they are social and have a caste system, they have some way of differentiating that. Why not food? Do ants make something like honey or do they just eat food? Oh, no, they don't make ant honey.

Well, this is the thing. There are so many insects that don't make honey. And I'm just like, come on, slackers. I'm going to go with the grass one. with grass yeah i think i just want to hear more about it which is my new method of picking the thing oh yeah i do want to hear more about it i'm gonna go with grass man grass man oh i'm going with grass man i'm gonna go with the poisoned animals one. That seems bad and I should know about it if it's real. And Sari was right.

So the grass one was based off of pandas. How much do they poop? Up to 40 times a day. They only digest less than a fifth of the bamboo that they eat. So they have to eat a ton of bamboo, which means they spend all day pooping undigested bamboo.

A panda can poop up to 14,000 times a year. Apparently, grass would be really bad for our teeth because of all the silica in there. And ruminants have ever-growing teeth. I don't know if that's the right term for it, but their teeth keep growing to replenish what they lose from chewing on rough grass. Spinach. And that has oxalate crystals in it. That's why it's like gritty in your teeth. But I don't eat a lot of it. That's true.

So that was all I had to say about the grass one. I hope that was a satisfying. It wasn't, but thank you. You're welcome. So yeah. So apparently in 1973, this chemical company so yeah so apparently in 1973 this chemical company accidentally swapped the flame retardant with a cattle nutritional supplement which seems like keep those in different parts of the the chemical plant it's not like big metal drums though yeah i guess so just unlabeled drums yeah they fed that to the cows and the farmers were like something's weird because like some of the calves are dying like the milk they're producing less milk they seem sick but they didn't know what was happening and so the milk went out into stores and like people drank it milk yeah the fact that it's milk now makes me think i've heard about this polybrominated biphenyl is the chemical that was

bad one was in the flame retardant it's one of the chemicals that acts sort of like an estrogen in the body. And so there were a lot of miscarriages in mothers around that time. And children who were exposed as fetuses ended up experiencing menstruation earlier than normal. But boys who were exposed ended up maturing more slowly and had genital abnormalities more than normal. And then the dairy farmers that were tested had a lot of immune system abnormalities. So a lot of people got this milk. Yeah, at least a few thousand before they figured it out. And then they had to like exterminate all the livestock and bury them somewhere. And the chemical company is now closed and is a superfund site. So yay for the 70s. We really had no idea. We had to learn somehow. I guess so. So the ant thing is based

on insulin, apparently, but it's not based on how much food they eat. There's a gene that controls how much insulin they produce that seems to have evolved now to respond to like social cues. And so when the female ants are in the presence of larva, this gene is, I guess it would be downregulated. And then, so they have less insulin. And then that causes them to not become reproductive females. So they just become like caretakers for the larva. And then the queens are the ones that end up, I guess they're not exposed to the larvae, and so they have higher insulin levels.

There's no larvae around, and they're like, oh, I'm needed. Yeah. It's like when there's a bunch of bananas around, their other bananas get ripe. Whoa! Is that true? Wait. Is it because of the radiation? No.

Okay. They release a gas that ripens each other? Yeah. That's like fruits in general really and that's why like if you put pears in a brown paper bag

you're like trapping that gas in there so it ripens oh I didn't know that they released that gas because I knew in like when they

transport oh yeah they pump it in there they pump it in to cause the ripening but I didn't know the plants were doing it that's cool

nature man so if you have a bunch of bananas and they're getting ripe too fast you separate them you gotta separate that's why banana hooks are a thing like you wait like set up the hook so that your bananas are kind of spread apart and hanging in the air i think so then the air travels around them more easily i thought it was just fun no it's to keep from ripening should i put it should i have a fan running on my bananas all the time you have a lot of bananas my bananas all the time? Yes.

You have a lot of bananas probably. Disperse that ethylene. You need to keep them fresh longer. Yeah. How many bananas do you buy at a time? Three. Three bunches? No, three bananas. Okay.

Wow. I don't even know they sell them in threes. They don't. I tear half of them. You creep. You can buy just one banana. Yes. You shouldn't though.

Why? I don't know. Yes. You shouldn't, though. Why? I don't know. It seems rude. It seems rude. But someone else might want four bananas or something. So if you just buy one, then you're really... Yeah, you're helping out. We need to set up some kind of app where we can figure it out.

Also, Stefan's touched every banana in the store. I don't doubt it. Yeah, I touch every banana, and then I pick one banana from each bunch until I have the three perfect bananas. What if you had to walk around a store and find your perfect banana partner? So you'd have to like, if you'd only take two, you had to find someone to take the other three? That could be fun. Yeah. Encourages a little bit of social interaction while you're grocery shopping.

Got three. I got a three. I got three first. Please, I just want to leave the store. I just want a banana next up we're going to take a short break

and then it'll be time for the fact off we're back! Sam Buck totals! Sari, you got one. Sam, you got one. Stephanie, you got two. I got zero.

And now it's time for the Fact Off, where two panelists have brought in science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow your minds. And you each have a Sam Buck to award to the fact that you like the most. This week, it's me versus Sari. So I'm worried, basically. And Sam has a trivia question

to decide which of us goes first. So Joey Chesna is an American competitive eater. He's currently ranked number one by the Major League Eating Organization. Every 4th of July, he competes in the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, and in 2018, he broke his own world record for the amount of hot dogs and buns eaten in 10 minutes. Okay.

How many did he eat? Whoever's closest. 10 minutes? Yeah. Hot dog and bun, 10 minutes. 21. Is that? 21?

I could eat 21 hot dogs in 10 minutes no you cannot I will go with for 22 wait because I will be closer than Sari that's really rude so the correct answer

is 74 you didn't even try to guess you were just making fun of me with that guess. I could not eat more than 21. I imagine Joey Chestnut had a normal metabolism, but apparently not. I don't know about metabolism. It's about stomach size. I don't know if this is a real thing, but do they wet the buns so that they go down smooth?

He can dip the bun. Yeah, dip the buns. He does the hot dog first and he dips the bun. It's not about fun. It's not for enjoyment. I want to have fun when I eat a lot of pie. I did a pie eating contest because I like pie. I do kind of want a hot dog now. And enjoy it. Unlike Joey.

So Hank, you go first. Oh, dang it. I should have gone with 20. In 2002, the body of a gray whale was found in Monterey Canyon at a depth of 2,891 meters, one of the deepest large whale falls ever found up to that point. And it was covered in deep-sea invertebrates, including weird, red, fuzzy plumes of what scientists discovered were several species of new worm in the genus Osedax.

Osedax are, as deep sea invertebrates often are, weird. The only Osedax that could be seen were female, and they were around 0.2 to 0.5 millimeters in width. So they were like, where are the males? Where are the males? Where are the males? The males were microscopic and inside of the female osedax tubes. Some of the larger worms had up to 111

males inside of them. But that is not my fact because that has nothing to do with nutrition. What makes osedax super weird is that the name osedax translates in Latin to bone devourer because they rely on mammalian bones for nutrition and it does that

without a mouth or a gut so it doesn't bite it doesn't chew it doesn't swallow instead this worm which is an animal has kind of roots so at the end of the female osedax, there's a bunch of green tissue that forms little fingers that dig into the bone and then sucks out various things inside of there. The marrow, the collagen, the cholesterol in the marrow. But the osedax worms cannot themselves digest that stuff. cannot themselves digest that stuff. And so, in addition to having microscopic males inside of them, they have little cellular compartments that house large rod-shaped bacteria called Oceanospiralis, which are able to break down the complex organic compounds necessary for the to survive. In most marine endosymbiosis, you have bacteria that are helping turn light into energy

for the host animal, but in this case, the endosymbiont is actually helping to convert food to food for these weird bone-devouring worms. And then they feed all their friends, their microscopic friends, inside of them? Yeah. I think

the males eat the same way. But they don't have roots? They don't have roots. They're just hanging out inside. It's like a lady house. It's like a lady house. Someone's like, am I allowed to say lady house? But it's weird.

When you look at them, it looks like algae is just growing on them. It's just sort of fuzzy. But when you get close up, you can see that there are these little worms. Her definition of nutrition at the very beginning. These are like plants because they don't have mouths or guts. I know. They just this is if this still counts as nutrition, then what plants do count as nutrition. Yes.

We're blurring the boundaries. We're finding the edges. Yeah. What if we didn't have mouths or guts and we just had roots out of our feet? Step on sandwiches? Just a big vat of food that you step in. The lunch area. Or it just comes out of your fingers.

You just put your fingers on a sandwich and little roots come out and infiltrate the sandwich. Why would we have invented sandwiches in this universe? That's a great, great point. Everything would just be soup. So there are 13 vitamins recognized by modern medicine. Those are things like vitamin C or biotin that keep us healthy. And vitamins don't provide energy like macronutrients, so like proteins or fats or things like that. But we typically can't synthesize enough of them with exceptions like vitamin D. So no one yells at me. And they're important for different biochemical reactions that keep us alive and functioning. And vitamin

deficiencies are generally bad for health. And throughout history, there have been substances that were called vitamins that have had the label stripped away from them for various reasons. Like Pluto. Like dangerous Pluto. And dangerous Pluto in this case is vitamin B17, which is notably nowadays not a vitamin. The chemical compound is called amygdalin, which was first isolated in 1830 by French chemists. It's a cyanogenic glycoside, which is a sugary chemical that can produce hydrogen cyanide when it's broken down and found in lots of plants like peach or apple or apricot seeds and pits and so when it was discovered this is why everyone always says there's cyanide and apple seeds yeah because there's a cyanogenic glycoside and it turns into cyanide inside of you yeah when it's metabolized by certain enzymes that turns into hydrogen cyanide and so amygdalin was

tentatively used in medical treatments in pill form, but determined to be too toxic in the late 1800s. But in the 1950s, a dude called E.T. Krebs Jr. branded a synthetic form of amygdalin called latril as vitamin B17 as a supposed cancer cure. The false theories include that latril is more toxic to cancer cells than normal cells so it would like target them more yeah that cancer is caused by a vitamin b17 deficiency of course and that the cyanide produced by the compound effectively boosts your immune system that's what they always say if it doesn't kill you yeah and so by the 1970s vitamin b17 picked up steam and tens of thousands of people were reported to have been treated with it. But when we actually did scientific studies, none of them found it to be effective. It is definitely not a vitamin because deficiencies of it don't do anything. And it caused cyanide

poisoning in the people who were treated with it. In 1980, the U.S. issued a federal ban on shipping Latril between states. And since then, it's been described as a scientific quackery. So like vitamin B-17 has become really notorious as a scientific quackery so like vitamin b17 has become really notorious as a fake campaign in medical history i love this because i've heard over and over and over again that there's cyanide in apple seeds but really this all comes from i bet vitamin b17 where they're like oh this chemical comes from apple seeds and it produces cyanide when we eat it and then that got mixed up and you know it's like if you eat an apple seed it's gonna pass yeah or unless you grind up

like a bunch of them yes i think that's what they did to produce vitamin b17 like grind up a bunch of pits all right you guys got your answers oh we have to choose yeah i just liked hearing about him. I don't want to change. Three, two, one. Hank. Oh, coming back. Oh, no. It's time now for Ask the Science Couch. We've got some listener questions to ask to our couch of finely honed scientific minds. This is from at Nits and Laughs. Is there a reason the science of nutrition has changed or seemed to change so much in a short period of time. I've been around for

40 years now, and it does seem like we have not been great at figuring out how to get people healthier. And it almost to me seems a little like the focus on nutrition might be hurting we put value judgments on food and we talk about what's good and what's bad and it's just freaking everybody out stressing people out and that's making us live less healthy lives yeah different food is going to treat different people differently different people like when we do find statistical you know know, like one thing is causing or doing something, the effect sizes are often really small, even if it is real. We just need to eat stuff that looks like food. So like a rock that looks like a… Yeah.

A hole or something? Just like one of those plastic hot dogs from set design. I can do that. But how the science of nutrition has changed rapidly or recently, I'm not really sure. I don't know that it, I don't get the sense that it has that much, except that like now we are more aware of less useful data that we can sort of find accidentally. So there's this very good paper where nutritionists did the research for me, which is very good. nutritionists did the research for me, which is very good. My understanding of it is that nutrition science has stayed pretty static and we've had a very like individual nutrient focused approach. And that was useful a hundred years ago when we were first discovering vitamins,

because it was like, what is this vital amine that I've let's call it thiamine this is vitamin b1 this is vitamin c it helps with scurvy and so like that was initial nutrition science and that's super useful that's very good nothing wrong with not getting scurvy yep so like that was the 1910s to 1950s ish 1950s to 70s is when we started realizing that there were non-communicable diseases that are diet related. So things that have to do with like a protein deficiency, then you have this. Or if you have like a certain vitamin deficiency. So like scurvy is an example of it. So it's like you specifically have one vitamin deficiency.

What does that do? There's a lot of focus on like if people don't have enough protein, what happens to them? If people don't have enough fat, what happens to them? What is worse? What is better? The general conclusion was like if people aren't eating, that's bad to them. If people don't have enough fat, what happens to them? What is worse? What is better? The general conclusion was like, if people aren't eating, that's bad for them.

The 70s and 90s are when diabetes started coming in where it's like diet-related chronic diseases that are longer lasting and maybe involving multiple factors, like multiple nutrition deficiencies. All the breakthroughs in that stuff are that recent?

Or like all of our understanding of it? Yeah. So like nutrition is just a young field. i was reading about people in the 70s were or maybe 60s or 70s when running marathons they would like drink shots of whiskey and stuff because they had no idea that like you should hydrate while exercising like they just didn't know until the mid-70s yeah weren't they thirsty yeah you'd think i think they were like the more i do this the worse i do and then from the 1990s to now the problem that we're running into is that we're using the same nutritional approach to answer the question what is a vitamin and how does disease work and And the disease is much more complicated. And now that

we're trying to do studies around nutrients and diets, along with things like genetic studies and like big clinical trials, we're getting more contradictory reports because the way that nutrition research has been structured so far is to like dial really, really in on what vitamins, what minerals, what macronutrients are involved. And so we're not framing the questions correctly or we're not, I don't know, we don't have the methodology set in place because also the way that we run trials for different kinds of research, we can't apply to nutrition questions necessarily. Like we can't assign people diets randomly and then assume that they'll actually stick to them right and when we give people food surveys about what they ate people's

memories are horrible so like they're not going to report that accurately necessarily and then there are a lot of confounding factors because nutrition is so integrated with other society right things like income or education or genetics or things like that. I read this headline and subhead that was about people cooking at home are healthier. But then a scientist was like, okay, let's look at that more granularly and found that people who cook at home who are wealthy are healthier than people who cook at home who are not as wealthy or less healthy because they cook things that are very easy and fast to cook at home. And so it's like this stuff's complicated.

And also that like when it comes to like societal health, there are a lot of these things that have less to do with like telling people what to eat and more to do with like class and access to food and like the ability to have time to like focus on things beyond like just you know making enough money to live but yeah so i guess the answer to this question it hasn't changed a lot but the questions that we're asking have changed a lot and that's why it seemed to change a lot right so like the way that we're doing nutrition research has stayed relatively the same and that's the problem.

If you want to ask your question to the Science Couch, follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we will tweet out topics from upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at PizzaTreeIsland and at John Luke Engel and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this week. Really sorry to John that you had to be up against PizzaTreeIsland there. The funnest name possible. Final Sambuck scores. Sarah, you've got one. Sam, you've got one. Stefan and I tied with two. I have points.

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I'm out of time. That's okay. Keep going. Okay. Thanks for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Siri Riley. I've been Stefan Chin.

And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroka Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph

Tuna-Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno, and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. The Dutch company has made poop into food by taking a waste product from sewage treatment plants and extracting the protein from it and turning that back into an edible product. Is anybody using it? It's got to just be for animal feed. I would think. Well, I mean, it's not that back into an edible product. Is anybody using it? Or is it, it's got to just be for animal feed. Animal feed, I would think.

Well, I mean, it's not like we couldn't eat it. It's just that we wouldn't. Yeah. If we found out where it came from. Soylent green is poopies.